Posts Tagged ‘Italy’

Italy’s “euthanasia in disguise” bill has been passed into law 30 years after it was first mooted. The law allows citizens to create advance directives about their treatment. These directives express their final wishes for medical treatment in case they lose the ability to communicate their choice. The Italian senate passed the bill into law Read more

Mafia connections between the Catholic church in southern Italy and organised crime are over. When a Sicilian mobster known as the “boss of bosses” died in prison last month, a spokesman for the Italian conference of bishops said it would be “unthinkable” to give him a public funeral. Read more Related Posts:Mafia godfathers banned from Read more

A priest called the guardian angel of refugees is under investigation for people trafficking. Mussie Zerai was nominated for a Nobel prize in 2015 for his compassion to refugees. For tens of thousands of desperate migrants, his cellphone number has meant the difference between life and death as their boats founder. He has been the Read more

The Vatican fountains are unusually quiet at present. That’s because Pope Francis has had them turned off to show solidarity and conserve water during the drought affecting much of Italy. Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si denounces wasteful practices and highlights the importance of clean drinking water. The prolonged drought has hit two-thirds of farmland and has Read more

A working group involving the Vatican and Italian dioceses has been set up to interpret Pope Francis’s reform of the marriage annulment process. As part of the reform, Pope Francis repealed aspects of a motu proprio from Pope Pius XI that set up regional tribunals in Italy. In the wake of Francis’s reforms, the Roman Read more

An Italian sect that arose after alleged apparitions of the child Jesus has been found guilty of schism and has incurred an automatic excommunication. The Diocese of Sora-Cassino-Aquino-Pontecorvo made the announcement on June 5 concerning the self-styled Universal Christian Church of the New Testament. This followed an examination by the Congregation for the Doctrine of Read more

A cash-strapped parish in Italy has asked parishioners to put scratch and win lottery cards on the offertory plate rather than money. A flyer on a door of San Martino church in Cigola near Brescia announced the move. “We all know we need help,” read the flyer. “So with a smile and without making givers Read more

A “normal” Catholic Italian girl has been dubbed “Lady Jihad” because of her recruiting prowess for ISIS. Former call centre worker Maria Giulia Sergio, 28, converted her entire Italian family to Islam and bullied them into starting new lives in Syria with ISIS, it is alleged. Maria is now known as Fatima Az Zahra. Italian Read more

An Italian parish is offering a baby bonus payment of NZ$3400 to local parents for their third child onwards. The initiative in the parish in Staggia Senese in Tuscany is aimed at helping local people have larger families. But the offer comes with strings attached. To qualify for the baby bonus, couples must already have at least Read more

The Vatican will release a document on consecrated widowhood later this year. This was reported by Avvenire, a newspaper owned by the Italian episcopal conference. The paper noted that there are 200 consecrated widows in Italy and that another 100 are in formation. Consecrated widowhood was noted by St John Paul II in a 1996 apostolic Read more

Comments

mel
Did the bishops resign in protest against the Pope's telling them off or did they resign because they failed their diocese and people and need to re'evaluate whether they should continue on within the clergy or within Church?

KieranI find it interesting that Pope St John Paul II gave us the Luminous Mysteries of the Rosary because the the three others sets lacked reference to the public ministry of Jesus, which, of course is found at the heart of the Gospels. The main sources for the presence of the Lord as Irenaeus puts it...

Patricia GrahamThe communion table is not closed because of "denomination" its closed because one denomination believes the bread in the Eucharist is the "Body" of Christ the other denomination believes its only a memory so by definition you really can't take part in a celebration that you have a different belief...

Patricia GrahamThe presence of the Lord in the word has always been "offered" to all Catholics in the many prayer devotions that are waiting for Catholics to embrace and to practice on a daily basis from Monday to Saturday so to speak with Sunday and the Eucharist being the devotion of all devotions with the Word...